Re-Imagining the Future of Experiential Learning Through a Campus-Wide Design Thinking Initiative

In 2020, Old Dominion University was awarded a State Council for Higher Education for Virginia grant in order to re-imagine the future of experiential learning at the institution. This campus-wide effort is led by a taskforce to create a vision, framework, and plan for the future of experiential learning at Old Dominion University. The taskforce is composed of stakeholders that include students, faculty, administrators, and community and business partners. In this chapter, the authors report on process and progress, with particular attention to the first three phases of the design thinking process. In the empathy phase, they have engaged in design thinking sprints, hosted monthly taskforce meetings, engaged in an exhaustive review of current experiential learning activities, and deployed surveys of relevant stakeholders. During the defining phase, they analyzed initial data, synthesized their collective empathy work, and identified root issues to craft their “How might we” questions to inform the ideation work. In this chapter, they also share the results of the ideation phase.

Smartphone Impacts on Outdoor Orientation Trip Goal Attainment

Background: Smartphones provide limitless opportunity for communication and access to the world through social media, texting, and numerous applications. As their popularity continues to grow among college students, it is important to understand the various advantages and disadvantages of their use on and off campus. Purpose: We explored the effect of smartphones on goal and objective attainment in the outdoor orientation program (OOP) at Old Dominion University. Methodology/Approach: Using post-experience focus groups, student participants and leaders, faculty and staff mentors, and program administrators were asked their perceptions of the impacts of smartphones on outdoor orientation. Findings/Conclusions: Analyses revealed that smartphones can be both a tool to help accomplish goals (i.e., develop connections) and a distraction to inhibit them. In addition, students shared feelings of security related to having smartphones with them at all times. Implications: These findings inform future research and policies focused on the role of smartphones in collegiate outdoor orientation programming, as well as provide implications for healthy smartphone habits in higher education.

First person – Carly York

ABSTRACTFirst Person is a series of interviews with the first authors of a selection of papers published in Biology Open, helping early-career researchers promote themselves alongside their papers. Carly York is first author on ‘Squids use multiple escape jet patterns throughout ontogeny’, published in BiO. Carly conducted the research described in this article while a PhD candidate in Ian Bartol's lab at Old Dominion University, Norfolk, USA. She is now an Assistant Professor of Biology at Lenoir-Rhyne University, investigating areas of animal physiology and biomechanics.

Who Hath Measured the (Proving) Ground: Variation in Offensive Capabilities Test and Evaluation

Multiple recent high-profile cyber intrusion and attack incidents have demonstrated serious weaponeering failures in which offensive tooling has not performed as the operators, planners, and designers had likely anticipated, leading to detection, degraded mission outcomes, and political blowback. These failures may be evaluated as resulting from multiple factors, in part through engineering errors introduced within the development lifecycle, as well as from immature command & control (C2), planning and the operational oversight processes. These cases suggest that despite the different identified failure modes in capabilities generation and employment, a common root cause of operational blunders may be identified in the lack of effective controlled range testing of exploit and implant capabilities packages prior to fielding and use in the wild. Observed evidence to date strongly indicates multiple intrusion sets pursue only limited—and in some case—no validation measures prior to executing live fires against target systems and networks. We seek to describe and explain apparent variations in adoption of munitions effectiveness testing for cyberweapons. We examine requirements, objectives, and benefits of capabilities validation efforts, balanced against resource investment, organizational integration, process agility, operational responsiveness, and other costs. We propose a model for analysis of mission assurance contributions provided by the cyber proving ground and consider this model in light of specific observed adversary behaviors indicating programmatic practices. We further explore the implications for the employment of such validation measures as a fundamental element of developing norms for responsible state cyber operations. Paper presented at the 15th International Conference on Cyber Warfare and Security (ICCWS 2020). Old Dominion University, Norfolk, Virginia. 12-13 March 2020.